


Any Way But This

by mnemememory



Category: Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/F, It's kind of ridiculous, Swearing, basically no romance (sorry)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 04:42:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10506522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemememory/pseuds/mnemememory
Summary: "I don't know what they want," Trini says. "But it's not me."(or, the aftermath of an argument between trini and her parents. kim's there. there's a lot of hugging involved).





	

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell i'm projecting? because i'm totally projecting. trini is such an amazing character, and i loved her back in MMPR and i love her now. i'll probably come back to edit this later. feels kind of repetitive from my last fic, but whatever, i'll fix it later. 
> 
> also kind of tw, there's sort of a discussion of homophobia in this? idk, i don't think it's that horrible, but you'll have to judge for yourselves.

“Hey,” Kim says, running a soothing hand across Trini’s arm. “Hey, do you want to talk about it?”

  
Trini shakes her head and buried her face deeper into the crook of Kim’s shoulder. She’s safe, here. She’s safe, there’s nothing that can hurt her, not here. Not with Kim right next to her, not with Kim holding her close like she means something, like she’s worth something.

  
They’re sitting in Kim’s room, hunched in the spare space between the bed and the window. It’s an easy climb, now – it would have been easy before, even without all the new things that have been happening with her body. But now it’s laughable, it’s ridiculous. Trini can pull herself up without even thinking about it, can break a glass in her hand and the shards won’t even leave a dent.

  
Kim’s room is different than she expected. Then again, Trini doesn’t know _what_ she expected, not from a girl like Kim, who wears her soul tucked tight under her arm and her eyes frosted over. The first-time Trini saw Kim she thought, _Wow, she’s pretty._ Then she thought, _But trouble_.

  
Then again, girls have always been trouble for Trini. No matter where she goes, it’s all the same.

  
Except, this time – this is Kim, who knows her name. Trini’s not another face in the crowd, isn’t a perpetual New Girl (and all the names that come with the label). She’s a Power Ranger, now. It seems so silly to be upset over something so small, when there’s a world at her feet and alien blood pumping through her muscles. Trini doesn’t care what Zordon says about being human – scrambling up sheer rock-faces feels about as far away from human as it gets.

  
There are posters on the wall; motivational ones, the sort that dollar-stores sell discount every time university kicks into action. There are print-outs, too – Trini sees a few shirtless guys, a few shirtless girls. She sees sticky-notes pasted everywhere, peeling off the plaster and scattering across the floor like fluorescent pink autumn leaves.

  
There are clothes everywhere – a discarded bra lying next to the desk, a pair of loose sweatpants flung carelessly over the chair. Trini is almost envious at the lack of control.

  
“Can you tell me what happened?” Kim finally says, when it appears the silence has stretched out too thin for her to bare. Trini closes her eyes and takes a shuddering breath: _In and out_ , she thinks. _In and out._

  
Trini wants to talk. Trini wants to open her mouth and let everything spill out, a cut to the stomach, bile pouring out from her skin and scrubbing her clean. She wants, she wants – she wants things that she shouldn’t want, that she isn’t going to get.

  
“It’s okay,” Kim says, when it becomes clear that Trini isn’t going to say anything. Trini’s stomach does something incredibly unpleasant. “Hey, it’s okay. Whatever you want to tell me.”

  
Trini doesn’t want to tell her. Not Kim. Maybe someone else – Zach? She trusts Zach. She trusts the others too, of course, but she trusts Zach more. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to live in the spaces in-between, in the gaps between sentences. Even at their most ghostly, the others have never been invisible.  
Of course, if she trusted Zach so much, maybe she should have gone to find him.

  
She hadn’t been thinking, though. That’s the crux of it – when the cards are down, when she’s feeling ripped into and hollow as a bird-bone, she comes to Kim. It’s so obvious now, and Trini almost wishes it wasn’t. She’s never been good at lying to herself.

  
“I don’t know what I am,” she says, and it feels like her throat is on fire.

  
Kim tilts her head slightly, fluffy hair falling onto Trini’s nose. She gives a little sneeze, pulling away and wiping her nose with her sleeve.

  
“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping frantically at her eyes.

  
“No,” Kim says. “Hey, no, you can’t do that. What’s the matter? What’s gotten into you?”

Talk, Trini thinks. That’s all her mother wants; an absence of silence. _Talk, Trini, why are you like this?_

  
“I don’t know what I am,” Trini repeats, feeling stupid. She always feels stupid around pretty girls, but maybe especially with Kim. Or, maybe not – it’s difficult to feel stupid around Kim, not when she’s looking at Trini like she has something important to say. “But I’m not what my parents want.”

Kim’s face clears slightly. “This is about…” she says, leaving it hanging.

  
Trini laughs at herself. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I know, it’s stupid. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have –”

  
“Hey, wait, no,” Kim says, reaching up and pulling Trini back to the ground with a small thud. “Wait, don’t go. That isn’t what I meant. What happened?”

  
“Nothing,” Trini says, scraping a hand through her hair. She feels sticky. Did she remember to take a shower this morning? “I mean, nothing important. It’s just –”

  
“You can tell me,” Kim says, and she looks so earnest. Trini wants desperately to believe her. “You know that, right? You can tell me anything, especially stuff like this.”

  
Trini curls her arms around her knees, rocking forward slightly into her weight. It still catches her off-guard, sometimes, the way these people actually want to listen. They ask her questions and they wait for her replies. It’s almost eerie; her words now carry weight. She has to think carefully about what she says, now, least she injure them in some way. She’s so good at breaking things.

  
“The first time I tried to come out to my Dad,” she says, burying her face forward into her elbows. Kim leans forward to hear her properly, but that’s it. No interruptions. Trini’s heart is beating a thousand miles per hour in her chest. “We were driving somewhere. I don’t know where. But it was just him and me in the car, and we were listening to the radio.”

  
Rain had been pelting across the ground, drumming a loud tap-tap-tap against the roof of the car. Trini had been bundled up in four layers of clothing, resting her forehead against the window and watching the buildings pass by in blurs of greyscale colour.

  
“Something came on – I don’t know what – and Dad, he mentioned…I don’t know. Something about being gay. And I said, totally unplanned, _What if I was gay_? Like, how stupid is that?”

  
“Trini…” Kim says, and she’s sliding a comforting arm around Trini’s shoulder. The warmth burns.

  
“And he says – I mean, he turns to look at me. We’re at a traffic light, and he turns to look at me. And I don’t remember what he looks like, just that he says, _Then don’t tell me. Doesn’t matter if you don’t tell me_.”

  
Kim’s arm tightens.

  
“And that’s it. That’s everything. He probably doesn’t even remember having that conversation.”

  
“What a bastard,” Kim says, pressing her forehead into Trini’s shoulder blade.

  
Trini squeezes her eyes tightly shut. She’s not crying, because that would be stupid. “My family, we’re supposed to fit into each other,” she says. “Like we’re puzzle pieces, or something stupid like that. My Mum, she’s got this ridiculous idea that we all love each other and everything’s perfect. Every day, I come home, and she asks me: _How’s your day_? And then she starts yelling at my brothers or my Dad or whatever. I’m supposed to look a certain way. I’m supposed to eat a certain way. I’m supposed to talk a certain way.”

  
Kim’s eyes are feral. Trini looks up, and then she can’t look away. It’s ridiculous how far gone she is, and it hasn’t even been a month. She’s had crushes before, of course, but they’ve always been easy enough to ignore. Trini aches.

  
“You’re fine,” Kim says, leaning back. “Actually, you know what? You’re _perfect._ Fucking perfect. I don’t know what your parents are thinking, but they’re idiots, obviously.”

  
Trini shakes her head and chokes back another laugh. She shouldn’t have come here. She should have gone – somewhere else. The gold mines. The Ranger’s station. Somewhere quiet, where she can think and breathe and just – be. Trini doesn’t know what to do, here. Doesn’t know what she’s doing here. The air’s hot and sticky, and Kim is right there, and she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing. Hell, she doesn’t even know what she wants. Everything’s just a jumbled mess of longing and frustration and confusion. Nothing’s making sense.

  
Why is she crying?

  
“I never talked about it to my Mum,” she says, and her voice sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the moon, for all she can concentrate. “Or to my brothers. I think they know already. All of them. I mean, I’m not that great at hiding it, and I’ve never had a boyfriend –”  
  


“You don’t need a boyfriend,” Kim hisses. “Not if you don’t want one.”

  
“Maybe I do want one?” Trini says. “Only probably not. Guys are gross.”

  
Kim laughs, and if she sounds kind of choked up, Trini’s mind is too tumultuous to really think about it. “They kind of are,” she says. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, some of them are okay.”

  
“Such as Jason,” Trini says, rolling her eyes slightly at Kim’s sudden flush. “And Zach, and Billy.”

  
“Zach’s an idiot,” Kim says, but she’s smiling when she says it. “But yeah, you’ve got the gist of it. But like, Trini, you know that you don’t have to like guys, right? That’s not something you should be forcing yourself to do.”

  
“I know,” Trini says, quiet.

  
Kim narrows her eyes at her. “Are you _sure?”_ she says. “Because that wasn’t a lot of conviction I heard just now. Fuck your family, they obviously don’t know shit. What did they do?”

  
Trini can’t help but tense up, forcibly reminded of why she was here in the first place.

  
It wasn’t even a big thing; it was small enough to be ridiculous. Everything about this is frankly ridiculous. Trini can already feel hot shame rolling across her shoulders, settling underneath her skin like a swarm of fire ants. This is what happens when you talk, she thinks. You ruin things.

  
“It’s stupid,” she says, when Kim doesn’t say anything else. Kim just looks at her, and Trini can’t contain the sigh that builds in the back of her chest. There’s something heavy weighing down her lungs, a piece of lead stuck between her stomach and her throat. “We were just – talking. At least, I think that’s what we were doing. We were eating breakfast, and my Mum was pressing me, and I wasn’t answering, and.”

  
“And?” Kim prompts.

  
Trini lets her head fall back, until she’s leaning hard against the mattress. She doesn’t want to look at Kim, doesn’t want to look at anything, but she does anyway. “And I kind of mentioned it, I think. They kept asking, _Do you have any friends? Are you keeping up with school?_ Stuff like that. And I mentioned you guys” – and it had hurt; it had hurt so much, to be able to say answer _yes, yes, here they are_ – “And…I don’t know. They wanted to know a lot.”

  
Kim shifts around, so she’s facing Trini instead of listing off to the side. She meets Trini’s eyes dead on. “That’s not a bad thing,” she says, keeping her voice slow and careful.

  
Trini rolls her head, looking off to her left. There’s a box of fairy-lights stuffed into the corner, dust covering the cardboard. There’s a cracked bulk lying on the top, glass shards scattered like stars. The pieces are small, but sharp enough to draw blood.

  
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” she says, rueful. “That’s my problem. But they kept on pressing, and _pressing,_ and I mentioned that three of you were guys, and that just…”

  
“You don’t have to have a boyfriend,” Kim says. “You don’t even have to have a girlfriend, if you don’t want.”

  
“I don’t know what I want,” Trini says, and nothing’s ever felt so true. “I don’t know what they want, but it’s not me. It’s never me.”

  
And then Kim’s hugging her. She’s soft, and warm, and Trini can feel it all the way to her bones.

**Author's Note:**

> this is not it! i have other things planned for this fandom. small things. something for kim (because there's no way i've given her enough love, here) and then something trini/(female)tommy because FANDOM IS HELL and if i'm going there, i'm dragging other people down with me. you're welcome.
> 
> come say hi on tumblr! (http://mnemememory.tumblr.com/). it's basically reblogging writing advice and fandom horror, but i do take prompts!


End file.
